Part of the Global Plot to Expose Moonbats, conspiracy nuts, and anti-Semites, especially the Jewish anti-Semitic variety.
The leftwing Neo-Nazi web magazine Counterpunch has described Plaut thus: "One of the most pernicious writers is Steven Plaut, a man who could be thought of as Israel's Daniel Pipes."

Friday, April 11, 2008

A Passover Story

Subject: A Passover Story

A Passover Story

By Steven Plaut

Once upon a time, somewhere in the steppes of Eastern Europe, in the Palethat contained many a Jewish village or stedtel, there roamed two beggars. Oneof these hoboes was Jewish and the other a gentile. The two transients werefriends and far too lazy to hold any real job or to do any work. So theywondered carefree, aimlessly and uselessly from village to village, begging forfood, sometimes collecting discarded things to sell, here and there stealingsome eggs or fruits off farm trees. It was a hard life and they often foundthemselves on the brink of starvation.

One day the two were looking for someone from whom they could "shnorr" somefood when they came upon a Jewish village whose residents were all buzzingabout, hurrying, scouring pots and pans, cleaning their homes and cooking. TheJewish beggar suddenly realized that it was but a few hours before Passover wasto begin. "We have extraordinary good luck today," he said to his gentilecomrade. "Tonight begins Passover, a Jewish holiday. Indeed, it is in manyways the happiest holiday of the year, with mountains of food and drink. Sohere is my plan. Let us come into the village just before evening. We willstand in the back of the synagogue. We will tell them that you and I are bothJewish wanderers, far from home, traveling to do some trading and seek ourfortunes. And the local Jews will invite us to the most wonderful banquet ofour lives!"

His gentile comrade agreed to the plan. They entered the village towardssunset and stood in the back of the "shul". And just as the Jewish beggar hadpredicted, the plan went off like clockwork. The locals competed with oneanother to see who would have the honor of hosting one of the beggars at hisown Passover seder. In the end, two families were selected. After the eveningprayers, the Jewish beggar went off to feast with one family, while his gentilefriend, pretending to be Jewish, went off to dine and celebrate with anotherfamily.

The gentile beggar's mouth was already watering with the thought of thewonderful delicacies he was about to devour. His belly grumbled withanticipation. But things were not going the way he had expected.

His hosts ushered him into a chair at a large table, set with candles andmany empty dishes. In the center, however, he saw nothing but some pathetichard boiled eggs, a few leaves, and a single small shank bone of meat. "Thisfor the entire assembly?" he wondered. Then, instead of pouncing on the food,his host poured everyone a single cup of wine, but a small one. The beggarguest would have much preferred a large bottle of vodka or a barrel of gin oreven some German lager.

But things just got worse. His hosts finished drinking their small glassesof wine and then offered everyone at the table a few small leaves to nibble.Not even enough to satisfy a rabbit! And they even insisted that he dip theseinto an awful salty solution, which only made him more thirsty and desperate todrink some real grog. Then to celebrate this "meal", they broke into song andlaughter, which went on for a whole hour.

When he was expecting them to serve him his dessert, they handed him insteada piece of bread, but not one like anything he had ever seen before. It wasdry, evidently having been left out in the sun for a week, and barely resembledreal bread. It was hard and it crackled when he chewed on it. Moreover it wasserved plain, with no oil or molasses or fat. "This is the feast my friendpromised me?" thought the beggar to himself. This is the mountain of foodthese Jews eat to celebrate their happiest holiday?

And then just imagine his horror at what came next. Each of the people atthe table was given the most bitter and disgusting glob of horseradish,something he would never ordinarily eat even if he were famished. They evenblessed God when they swallowed the horrid-smelling and evil-tasting slop!

Convinced the "meal" was over, the beggar excused himself, said he wasneeded elsewhere with great urgency, and left his hosts with an apology. Hethen wandered the streets of the village, looking for his Jewish beggar mate,preparing to thrash him in rage and scream at him for his empty promise of afull stomach and a glorious meal.

It was only four hours later that he found his Jewish friend. The Jewishbeggar was wandering through the alleys, his shirt buttons popping, his bellyoverfull, picking at his teeth, belching his pleasure. He was so full of foodthat he could only stroll along at a relaxed pace, humming to himself withpleasure. His gentile friend was so weak with hunger that he was unable evento pummel his friend. The Jewish beggar examined his starving comrade withsurprise. "What happened?" he asked. "Some feast you promised me!" said theother. And then he told the Jewish beggar what had happened, how his hosts hadoffered him a thimble of wine, a handful of pathetic leaves in brine, a stalepiece of bread of some sort with nothing on it, and – in the names of allSaints – some horrid bitter glob. "At that point I decided enough is enough,"he explained, "and I got up and left."

The Jewish beggar could not control his laughter. You do not understand, heexplained. Those were simply the earliest preliminaries of the feast. You havesnatched hunger from out of the horn of cornucopia! Had you stuck things outfor just a few more minutes, you would have been served the most sumptuousfeast of your life, a meal for kings, food that would have sufficed you for awhole week of wanderings. There would have been more food than you could eat,fish, eggs, meats, delights you can only imagine, along with wine and drink.But you see, you abandoned hope only a few moments too soon. Had you just alittle more patience and determination, you would have a belly filled tobursting. It would have been one of the happiest nights of your life.

Because you were impatient, you spoiled everything.

* * * * * * *

The story of the two beggars is not a fairy tale nor a goodnight fantasyfor children. The gentile beggar in the story, the one who spoiled everythingbecause of his own ignorance and impatience, is the state of Israel. Like thegentile beggar who did not understand where he was nor what was going on, likethe fool who misunderstood the preliminaries as the entire meal, the state ofIsrael was on the verge of entering the most wonderful, prosperous andliberated period of its existence in the early 1990s. Had it listened to theJewish beggar, all would have been well. Had it found patience and stamina tostick things out for just a little longer, it would have achieved its deepestdesires and fulfilled its strongest yearnings.

By 1990, the "first Palestinian intifada" had been defeated, suppressed byforce of Israeli arms. The dimensions of Palestinian violence were droppingeach month. It would likely have been ended altogether had Israel used morevigorous force against the rioters. Those Israelis saying they thought Israelshould use MORE force to end the violence outnumbered those saying less forceshould be used by perhaps four to one. It was a near-consensus. Israelis werein no mood to appease or capitulate.

The intifada violence that had begun in the late 1980`s had petered out,with fewer and fewer incidents of violence by the month and with the terroristsso desperate for weapons that they were concocting zip guns out of householdmaterials and Molotov cocktails, far more likely to scorch the throwers thanany targets. The best that the terrorists could do in most cases was to tossrocks at Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip or in parts of the West Bank, aphenomenon that was unpleasant, but not life-threatening, and certainly was noexistential threat to the entire country. Other parts of the West Bank werefairly tranquil, including Bethlehem and Jericho. Jews could walk or ride insecurity in many parts of the "occupied territories" and in all of Israel.

The leaders of the Palestinian terrorists were off in distant Tunis, with afew others in Damascus, places from which they could do little more than poutand bluster. The world -- or at least the United States -- had made its peacewith the Israeli position that the PLO was not an acceptable partner in anyArab-Israeli peace talks and that the most that Palestinian Arabs could hopefor would be a limited autonomy, with no role whatsoever for the PLO. Therewas enormous support in the United States, and in parts of Europe, for Israel'sposition that limited autonomy without the PLO was more than generous and thebest for which the Palestinians could hope, a fair and just solution. Even theEgyptians were formally on board behind that program. The Jordanian border wastranquil and the impoverished Syria afraid to risk any confrontations. Sure,the world belly-ached when Israel used force to suppress the rioters androck-throwers. But - within Israel - there was near-consensus that the causefor the rock throwing and Palestinian hooliganism was the use of insufficientforce by the Israeli army, not Israeli "war crimes" and brutality.

Few took seriously the notion that Palestinians were a "people" deservingof their own state. Israelis were willing to treat them as the Palestinianbranch of the Arab people, entitled perhaps to control their own lives andconduct their own local affairs - in exchange for foreswearing violence, andthis was a formula backed by the United States. While a few demagogues in theUS spoke about a Palestinian "state" and "people", this was not the Americanofficial position. Calls for "self-determination" for Palestinians weresomething usually restricted to the Third World dictators or the anti-Americanleftist extremists in the West. Israelis themselves were in near-consensusthat Palestinian "statehood" was a nonstarter, and that limited autonomy forPalestinians alongside Jewish settlement of the West Bank and Gaza were theonly plausible long-term peace strategy.

Things became even more encouraging when the United States trounced Iraq,after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Israel had earned American gratitude andsupport for its own interests by sitting tight and turning the national cheekwhen Saddam hurled his SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv. Americans were angry at Arabaggressors. The PLO had lost any residual sympathy it might have had in theUnited States and parts of Europe when it chose to play the role of cheerleaderfor Saddam's aggression against Kuwait. The Israeli public still had freshmemories of the Palestinians dancing on their roofs when Saddam's SCUDs fell,and there were very few in Israel who were willing to regard seriously anythingabout "Palestinian rights". After their behavior in the Gulf War, even a headof the semi-Marxist Meretz party stated that the Palestinians could go getstuffed (in Hebrew, "wait for me at the corner"). There was virtually nosympathy for the idea of making any further "goodwill gestures" to thePalestinian barbarians who had danced in glee and screamed, "Saddam, Saddam,Incinerate Tel Aviv."

In the early 1990s, the Israeli economy was booming, riding the crest ofthe high-tech revolution. The country was being flooded with immigrants fromthe countries that had comprised the Soviet empire. They were arriving withtheir economic drive, their advanced degrees and skills, together with othersfrom Argentina and France. The standard of living in Israel had reached thelevels of the middle tier of Western European countries. Israelis enjoyedtheir Scandinavian-style welfare benefits, their almost-free medicine, theirworld-class universities. While many Israeli Arabs voted for the anti-ZionistStalinist Party to show their contempt for their own country and theirsolidarity with its enemies, many others did not and voted for the Zionistparties, maintaining cordial relations with Jews. Tourism was recovering, asthe intifada violence was suppressed. Even the weather cooperated, with somewet winters, and the Sea of Galilee even burst its banks, full of water.

And into this near-pastoral tranquility came the Oslo ``peace process", ledby the ignorant beggar who did not understand that the greatest of feasts wasnigh. Oslo was based on the proposition that economic interests andconsumerism had replaced military power as the determinants of internationalrelations in the post-modern world. It sought to reduce tensions with thePalestinian Arabs, who had just been defeated in their intifada, by importingthe PLO`s leadership from Tunis and Damascus into the ``occupied territories``and then allowing it to arm itself and build up an army in the suburbs of TelAviv and Jerusalem, bankrolled and armed by Israel itself. Like the beggar whosnatched starvation from the jaws of plentitude, the Israeli government ofYitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws ofvictory. They turned the near-tranquil Israel of the early 1990s into theShadow of the Valley of Death.

Peres and Rabin became convinced that the most promising path towards peacewas Israeli capitulation to Arab demands and appeasement of the planet's worstIslamofascist terrorists. Peres and Rabin lectured the country about how therewas not peace because the Israelis were not strongly desirous enough of it.They believed that the best strategy for achieving Middle East peace was toflood Israel with billboards and bumper stickers about how nice peace is andhow nasty war is. The Israel Left used its control of the mass media to attackthe Israeli soul and morale, hectoring Israelis about their "insensitivity" tothe Palestinian "Other".

The PLO was invited into the outskirts of Israel's main cities. It set up anarmy of tens of thousands of soldiers, now controlled by the Hamas, possessinganti-aircraft missiles that threaten Israeli civilian and military air traffic,and a system of police-state control over the Palestinian population. ThePalestinian stormtroopers possess anti-tank weapons, Katyusha rockets, andal-Kassem rocket factories. The Gaza Strip is today a large mortar and rocketfactory. The goodwill measures of Israel produced a campaign of Nazi-likehatred led by the Palestinian Authority, down to and including virulentHolocaust denial accompanied by Holocaust justification (never mind thecontradiction).

Oslo was based on the proposition that armies are obsolete and so also ispatriotism, that appeasement of fascist terrorists is the surest path to truepeace, that Israeli self-debasement is the highest form of patriotism, thatcowardice is the highest form of valor, that the best way to end war is topretend it does not exist. The Rabin-Peres government adopted as its mantrathat old Peter and Gordon song, "I don't care what they say, I won't stay in aworld without love." Peres and Beilin decided that if reality is ugly andtough, the solution is to live in fantasy. They refused to live in a realityin which war is present and where problems cannot be resolved through buildingtourist hotels and internet web services.

Years into the ``peace process,`` Prime Minister Ehud Barak was ready tohand over to the PLO the Old City of Jerusalem, including control over theWestern Wall, in addition to slabs of pre-1967 Israeli territory in the Negev-- all this while the Palestinians were routinely murdering Jewish civilians,many of them children. The PLO`s response to Barak's obsequiousness was tolaunch a new war against Israel in the form of the "Al-Aqsa intifada".

The Oslo era was accompanied by a massive assault upon Israel`s pride,morale and confidence by its own leaders and intellectual elites. Israeliintellectuals lectured the country about its original sinfulness. Israel wasflooded with ``New Historians`` and ``Post-Zionists`` who zealously set aboutthe task of rewriting history texts and school curricula to promote the Arab``narrative`` -- i.e. the false Arab version of history. Large swaths ofIsraeli universities became the occupied territories of tenured traitors,working for the enemy, seeking the destruction of their own country.

Israeli politicians, ever attentive to the zeitgeist of trendy secularism,announced themselves ready to strip the country of all of its Jewish nationalemblems, from the star on the flag to the words of the national anthem. And,after 1,300 years of discrimination against Jews by Arabs, Israeli politicianswere implementing ``reverse discrimination`` programs, under which Arabsreceived preferences and Jews suffered from quotas.

One after the other, Israeli politicians mouthed the post-modernistgibberish of the anti-Israel choruses from overseas -- how Israelis need tostop ruling over another "people", how they have to learn to understand the"Other," how they must bring themselves to commemorate the ``tragedies`` theJews had imposed upon the Arabs and make restitution. The Israeli publicschool system was conscripted to proliferate Arab ideology. Israelipoliticians and leftist professors seriously proposed that Israel create aNational "Naqba" Day, in which it atone for the very fact of its creation andthe "catastrophe" that this creation caused to Israeli Arabs.

The Israeli media bludgeoned the country on a daily basis, promotingPalestinian propaganda in editorials, Op-Ed columns and even ostensiblyobjective news stories. This Israeli self-flagellation produced a situationwhereby each and every atrocity committed by Arabs was greeted with calls fromthe Israeli chattering classes for further concessions and appeasements byIsrael. Some, including tenured extremists at the universities, went so far asto justify and celebrate Arab acts of terror as necessary to force Israelis tocome to their senses and make peace on terms favored by these extremists. TheLeft promoted insubordination and mutiny by soldiers in the military, and someendorsed boycotts of Israel by overseas anti-Semites. The Israeli pressadopted the practice of overseas Israel-Bashers in referring to Palestiniannazi terrorists and suicide bombers as "activists and militants".

For 15 years the Israeli elites lived in a make-pretend world, in whichJews were to blame for everything and Arabs were merely expressing"frustration" at being "mistreated" for so many years by Jews. Thepsychological war by Israel`s elites against national pride, dignity andself-respect -- indeed against national existence -- was accompanied by a setof diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing.

Israel was pursuing a policy that in effect was based on letting no act ofArab violence go unrewarded. Ehud Barak surrendered to terror and withdrewIsraeli troops from Lebanon, and in so doing placed all of northern Israel, theHaifa Bay and its refineries within rocket range of Hizbullah. Barak'scowardice in 2000 produced 4000 rockets landing in northern Israel in 2006.The Israeli national policy of self-debasement was accepted with equanimity bymuch of the Israeli public, which hoped against hope that its leaders` promisesof a light at the end of the Oslo tunnel would come to pass. There was nolight, other than from the flashes of exploding buses full of children.

The 1990`s were the era in which it became evident that a great manyIsraelis and most of the Israeli elite had lost their will to survive as anation. After centuries in which Jews maintained the most militant sorts ofpride and self-assurance even while being mistreated, despised and humiliated,here were the Israelis, possessing one of the great armies of the world,abandoning all pride and explicitly promoting self-humiliation andself-destruction. The same Israeli military that had rescued the Jewishhostages in Entebbe was suddenly incapable of rescuing a wounded IDF soldierbleeding to death in Joseph`s Tomb in Nablus or protecting children under firein Sderot.

Here was an Israel unwilling to use force to prevent Palestinians fromfiring rifles and mortars into civilian homes, instead begging the PalestinianAuthority to hold talks with those doing the shooting in order to "work outdifferences and reach understandings."

An Israel no more than two generations removed from the Holocaust waswilling to hold "peace talks" with people who denied there ever was a Holocaustand who insist that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passovermatzos. The same Jewish people that had fought against enormous odds and wonin 1948 was acquiescing in a "peace process" that involved unilateral peacegestures from Israel in exchange for the Arabs continuing to make war againstthe Jews.

Israel's leaders were given a very clear choice in the early 1990s. Theycould have followed the lead of the Jewish beggar, hold back their appetitesfor just a bit longer and defer their gratification just a bit, suppressing theresidual of Palestinian violence and denazifying the West Bank and Gaza. Andthen they would have enjoyed a sumptuous Passover feast like none before it.But they chose to behave like the foolish gentile beggar in the story who hadno idea of what was going on, who let his hunger get the best of him, and whostormed out of the feast in irritation, just before the delights of the feastwere to begin in earnest. Because of Israeli frustration at Palestinianguttersnipes tossing rocks at Israeli troops, Israel swapped them for suicidebombers exterminating hundreds of Jewish children and other civilians inJerusalem and Haifa.

Is the foolish beggar still with us? That impatient one who does notunderstand the rules of the seder? The one who is unwilling to control hishunger pangs for just a little longer? Can we bring back the Jewish beggar whocorrectly understands the rituals of the seder and understands Jewish heritage,who knows how to wait patiently and achieve the delightful bloated belly ofsatisfaction and prosperity?

I search, but do not find him anywhere. I do not know where he has gone.